RJI Innovation

How we aimed to center community voices in a candidate forum

In collaboration with multiple central Pennsylvania newsrooms, we hosted a candidate forum focused on community listening.

How to deepen the impact of newsletter call to actions

We partnered with PublicSource to identify tools and workflows that would help foster experimentation with their pop-up newsletter CTAs.

Q&A: How newsrooms can reimagine community safety at events

A conversation with Mariah Castañeda, LA Public Press

How to work with a local artist to design merch for your newsroom

Tips range from how much to pay your artist to how to set up a print-on-demand platform.

Building interactive visuals for newsletter engagement

We experimented with a community-contributed holiday gift guide with Sioux Falls Simplified.

How to build news quizzes to encourage habitual engagement

We helped Missouri Business Alert find tools and strategies to bring their social media news quiz to new audiences.

Q&A: Reaching multilingual communities starts with listening and collaboration

Aala Abdullahi is the innovation editor at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, where she has focused on merging community engagement with product development.

Building a chatbot trained on your newsroom’s content

We tested chatbot platforms to learn more about the time, money and ethical considerations required.

10 things to build community in your remote or hybrid news organization

From playlists to brainstorming sessions, here are some examples of what's working in news orgs to build community and camaraderie.

Adobe Podcast, Audo Studio and other tools bring new possibilities to editing audio and overprocessing

Whether you’re an audio journalist, host a podcast or record audio interviews for stories on rare occasions — you’ve likely run into one (if not all) of the many common disruptions to clean audio: dogs barking, traffic blaring, winds howling, background buzzing from AC units, construction and more. Innovation in Focus tested four different AI audio editing services to see how they clean up imperfect audio for different situations.

Five different AI options for transcribing audio

While we could not test every AI transcription service out there, we chose five options that we found highly recommended and/or free alternatives with unique tools that could be helpful in day-to-day reporting. We partnered with KBIA to run an audio interview through each of these services: Parrot AI, Otter AI, Google Pinpoint, Rev and Sonix.

Creating an affordable sms system for your community newsroom

As part of an ongoing effort to broaden the impact of their coverage, many newsrooms are trying text messaging communication to more directly speak with audience members who can benefit from receiving the news.

SMS systems are often expensive, pay per a text plans can make it affordable.

5 ways that local newsrooms can utilize TikTok

If you’re in a local newsroom and don’t quite know where to begin, here are five tips and tricks from what we’ve learned so far by diving into TikTok.